ratarmount VS Video-Hub-App

This is basically the same reason why I started with ratarmount (https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount) but the focus was more on runtime performance and random access and as the name suggests it started out with access to recursive tar archives. The current version should also work for your use case with recursive zips.

As an added complication this would need to work under windows (i need onenote and that's win only :/ ) ; this alone makes the majority of solutions that i came up with impossible. One way could've been splitting the data onto various tar files and then mounting those with rartarmount but...linux only :( .

Pragzip actually decompress in parallel and also access at random. I did a Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366959

indexed_gzip https://github.com/pauldmccarthy/indexed_gzip can also do random access but is not parallel.

Both have to do a linear scan first though. The implementations however can do the linear scan on-demand, i.e., they scan only as far as needed.

bzip2 works very well with this approach. xz only works with this approach when compressed with multiple blocks. Similar is true for zstd.

For zstd, there also exists a seekable variant, which stores the block index at the end as metadata to avoid the linear scan. indexed_zstd offers random access to those files https://github.com/martinellimarco/indexed_zstd

I wrote pragzip and also combined all of the other random access compression backends in ratarmount to offer random access to TAR files that is magnitudes faster than archivemount: https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount

Or via the experimental AppImage I created this week:

    wget -O ratarmount 'https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount/releases/download/v0.10.0/ratarmount-manylinux2014_x86_64.AppImage'

I've recently been looking into this same issue because I analyse a lot of data like sosreports or other tar/compressed data from customer systems. Currently I untar these onto my zfs filesystem which works out OK because it has zstd compression enabled but I end up decompressing and recompressing which is quite expensive as often the files are GBs or more compressed.

But I've started using a tool called "ratarmount" (https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount) which creates an index once (and something I could automate our upload system to generate in advance, but you can also just process it lcoally) and then lets you fuse mount the file. This works pretty great with the only exception that I can't create scratch files inside the directory layout which in the past I'd wanted to do.

I was surprised how hard a problem to solve it is to get a bundle file format that is indexable and compressed with a good and fast compression algorithm which mostly boils down to zstd at this point.

While it works quite well, especially with gzip and bzip2, sadly the zstd and xz (and some other compression formats) don't allow for decompressing only parts of a file by default, even though it's possible the default tools aren't doing it. The nitty gritty details are summarised here:

Well, you could try to skip extraction and access the tar archive using ratarmount, and stack overlayfs on top to allow writing, but that will have an impact on compilation time.

First $100: Thirty copies sold of Video Hub App

First $1,000: Three hundred copies sold of my Video Hub App

https://videohubapp.com/

Though I do donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-effective charity so in theory I made no money for a while until I bumped the price to $5 / copy.

semi-on-topic: I created Video Hub App that is like YouTube for local files: shows you a gallery with scrub-able (preview on hover) thumbnails. But does not work streaming videos to TV / tablet - only for local consumption. Hope someone finds it useful.

https://videohubapp.com/

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I created Video Hub App which is MIT License

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I also sell it for $5 and have sold just over 5,000 copies last month (5 years old app). Importantly, $3.50 of every purchase goes to a cost-effective charity, GiveWell recommended Against Malaria Foundation (see website for details).

https://videohubapp.com/

"The problem" might be that people in this thread and others get frustrated because others have different goals than them.

Of course Electron is overkill for a single-button application. But Visual Basic is absolutely going to be a headache if you want a custom GUI.

Pick the tool that's right for the job!

I build this with Electron: https://videohubapp.com/

Simplest File Renamer - https://www.yboris.dev/renamer & https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer

I wanted to be able to quickly rename files with my text editor (using keyboard commands), so this lets me do it. Plus I share the app online for free.

Video Hub App - https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I started it just for myself, but it ended up so good I spent several more years improving it as people kept buying it (up to almost 5,000 purchases since I started).

Also wrote a couple of dev tools for myself (sharing via NPM too) - https://www.yboris.dev/

I created Video Hub App: https://videohubapp.com/ - it shows screenshots from videos as you scrub/hover across the thumbnail.

I've been so frustrated that FFprobe functionality is not part of FFmpeg.

My app extracts screenshots from videos to create a beautiful gallery of videos. But even though I include FFmpeg already, I need a 50mb FFprobe executable to be bundled with my app just so that I can determine the width, height, duration, and fps of a video file! What is it that FFprobe does that FFmpeg couldn't do with a few extra pieces of exposed API?

https://videohubapp.com/ - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/772b25bbd4b41...

Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).

It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).

https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Built Video Hub App that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5 years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison to others, but I'm just starting out ;)

https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

What I did that is most impactful is that I've been giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities for over 10 years now (see Giving What We Can - thousands of others do the same). This amounts to almost $100,000 given to charity which translates to thousands of people protected from malaria for many years of their lives.

My personal model for my commercial software: charityware - require a payment but made most proceeds go to my favorite (cost-effective) charity.

I'm getting about 100 purchases ($500/month, donating $350 of that) with my Video Hub App - https://videohubapp.com/ - which is also open source - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I wrote about charityware a few years ago: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...